Fringe Artist

Wanda Jackson’s accomplishments could line a highway from here to Nashville — a string of achievements that includes being the first woman to record a rock song. “The stage was my kingdom, and I ruled,” said the Queen of Rockabilly, now 73, on her way to a recent guest performance in “Million Dollar Quartet,” a musical about the golden days of rock ’n’ roll.

It’s a hoary old chestnut, but who can blame her for the reminder? She certainly lives up to her claim on stage. Despite having buried her mother the day before and awakened at 4 a.m. to fly from her native Oklahoma for an afternoon taping of “Letterman,” Jackson belied her exhaustion and charmed the Broadway audience, closing the show with her bawdy 1958 hit, “Fujiyama Mama.” The hips may not quite gyrate like they used to, but Jackson shows no signs of abdicating anytime soon.

Not if her booster Jack White has anything to do with it. Thanks to White, who produced and plays guitar on Jackson’s new album, “The Party Ain’t Over,” she is growling and shimmying her way back into the limelight. “She’s not as well known as some other musical pioneers,” White says. “But you can’t overstate her importance to rock ’n’ roll. It blows my mind to think that she was doing this before it had a name.”

And in a season in which Jackson’s signature fringe — she is to fringe what Elvis was to gold lamé — appeared on the runways of Tom Ford, Roberto Cavalli and Versace, the diminutive diva is also at the height of fashion.

“Well, live long enough. . . .” Jackson said over dinner, laughing and enjoying a much-needed gin and tonic. “That’s my motto and I’m sticking to it. But fashion was always important to me. My father taught me at a young age that you have to sound different and look different on a stage.”

Just as her carnal growl and swivel stood out among the sexless musical stylings of her female contemporaries in the mid-1950s, when she hitched her wagon to rockabilly, Jackson dazzled the eye and bucked convention with her form-fitting fringed dresses. “I was always a bit hippy,” she offered, “so those siesta skirts with full petticoats didn’t look good on me. And at my tallest, I was 5-foot-1, so cowboy boots were out of the question. Sometimes a girl just needs heels.”

“In many ways she was the female Elvis,” says Holly George-Warren, co-author of the book “How the West Was Worn.” “Her body was at one with the music, and her clothes were a raunchy expression of that. Long before Michelle Obama, Wanda showed her toned arms; you could see her muscles rippling when she played the guitar. She was a living, breathing woman and refused to be a performing doll.”

Although Jackson counts Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren as early idols, and was also influenced as a young girl by the country singer Rose Maddox (who played in a group billed as “America’s Most Colorful Hillbilly Band”), the person largely responsible for her modernized take on country drag was her mother, Nellie. In a 1997 article in The Sunday Oklahoman announcing her as the March winner of the newspaper’s Golden Thimble award, Nellie explained how she sewed the rhinestones on her daughter’s costumes by hand and used silk fringe instead of leather because it created extra drama when she twirled around. She added proudly, “Sometimes I look at a costume she’s wearing and say to myself, ‘I did a pretty good job on that one.’ ”

Not everyone was a fan. Jackson remembers occasionally incurring the wrath of her father, Tom, her mentor and chaperon on early tours. “My sweetheart collars were never too revealing,” she explained. “But Mother and I would be working on an outfit, and my father used to come in and tell her to raise the neckline an inch or so. As soon as he would leave the room, she would leave it where it was. I liked to push it as much as I could.”

The following night, playing in front of a sold-out concert of latter-day wildcats in Brooklyn, Jackson is true to cheeky form, purring her way through a set of mostly standards and amusing the audience with her ageless banter. Deep into the night, Jackson, who became a born-again Christian in the 1970s, begins to introduce a cover of “Dust on the Bible.” She pauses for effect, then adds, “The next song is a hymnal from the Church of the What’s Happening Now.”